208: What Is Trauma and What Does It Mean To Be Trauma-Informed? With Dr. Megan Kirk Chang
Learning about our own traumatic experiences helps us recognize behavioral or emotional patterns that we resort to in order to protect ourselves. This lets us turn down the volume of our inner critic and understand how our experiences shape who we are today.
If you’re a yoga teacher, massage therapist, coach, manager or somebody whose job it is to hold space for others, it’s important that you listen to this episode!
We discuss what being trauma-informed really means with mental healthy clinician scientist, Dr. Megan Kirk Chang. Megan has done extensive research over the last several years to better understand trauma, especially when it comes to what happens physically in the body.
It’s important to have a trauma-informed approach because it helps you better hold space for others. We’ve all been through hardships and you don’t know who is still experiencing trauma. Rather than avoid or hope that everybody is fine, there are some easy things that you can do to be more inclusive.
Listen in to discover:
- What happens in your body when you experience a trauma (regardless of how big or small you judge the incident to be)
- What it means to be a trauma-informed practitioner and examples of how to hold trauma-informed space
- A deeper look into what your physiology does to protect you and how that response, if strong enough, affects you moving forward
- We nerd out a little and take a dive into some different parts of the nervous system
- How to soothe yourself via the nervous system when you’re feeling unsafe in a safe environment